It’s Indigenous People’s Day, a time to reflect back on what was taken by force and cruelty.  I’d like to add ignorance but perhaps that is too kind.

On Saturday, our family gathered on Coast Miwok land to watch the Blue Angels.   The Miwok used to travel across the bay in tule boats.  Now, jets scream overhead as birds show how serene flight can be.

Logically I can say that environmentally and financially “Fleet Week”  makes no sense, but when I hear the roar and see the flash of blue and yellow so precariously, yet harmoniously flying overhead, I lift on the sight of speed, forgetting the cost.

I’m with the words of Thich Nhat Hanh:

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

We’re considering moving to gather family closer together.  A friend asks if I could leave Mount Tam.  

Maria Popova describes Mount Tam as “the first vertebrae of the mountainous backbone of the Americas that stretches all the way to Tierra del Fuego”.

She celebrates Etel Adman who painted and wrote about Mt. Tam.

Etel Adman: In this unending universe Tamalpais is a miraculous thing, the miracle of matter itself: something we can single out, the pyramid of our own identity. We are, because it is stable and it is ever changing. Our identity is the series of the mountain’s becomings, our peace is its stubborn existence.

Can I leave her, move down the line of vertebrae?  When I went to Nepal, I felt Mt. Tam sent me there, sent me to her sister mountains, mountains connected at the root. Where might she send me now?

On Saturday I was with my grandson who is almost two.  We played a game where we placed a small block on our head, and then leaned left or right and off it fell and we did it again and again. 

Where do I lean now to stretch and gather laughter like an opened cloak?

Etel Adman: “When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive.”